"Sprung from pure flamenco, Manuel Liñán exudes purity from himself and his dance - he is life, freshness and passion."  Leaving aside the need for a better copywriter, or at least translator, what does this, the opening line of the flamenco performer's biography in the programme for the Sadler's Wells Flamenco Festival, tell us about him?  That he's not afraid of making big claims, certainly. That he may have a teeny bit of a god complex ("sprung from"?

The Sadler's Wells Flamenco Festival is cunningly scheduled for that particularly dreary fortnight in late February when winter has been going on forever, spring is still just out of reach, and half term brings the dismal realisation that we're only just halfway through the school year and summer holidays are still at least five months away. When you're longing to be somewhere else, there's nothing like flamenco, a raw, gritty music-and-dance form born among the dispossessed of southern Spain.

Is there an art-form more tied to bad as well as good tradition than classical ballet? Yolanda Sonnabend’s unatmospherically if expensively kitsch designs for this Swan Lake wouldn’t have lasted more than a season or two in the worlds of theatre and opera, yet here they still are in Anthony Dowell’s soon-to-be-retired homage to Petipa and Ivanov, first seen in 1987 and due to take Swan Lake at Covent Garden past the 1000^th performance in the present run.

The Associates is not the title of a new Scandi crime drama, though in dance world terms we’re perhaps approaching that level of Event. Associates are what Sadler’s Wells, London’s dance powerhouse, calls the selected band of dancemakers it deems serioulsy interesting, and worth co-commissioning.

One of the dance world's better-kept secrets is the existence of a brilliantly inventive comic double-act consisting of two paunchy, balding 50-something men. Neither humour nor the over-50s are seen all that often in dance, but it isn't tokenism which makes dance insiders turn out in delighted force for choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion: it's the knowledge that Burrows and Fargion's shows are one of the surest bets in dance for an evening that will be original, funny and clever in equal measure.

The habit among ballet critics of being simultaneously down on John Cranko's 1965 Onegin and up on Kenneth MacMillan's 1974 Manon is a curious one. The two have many similarities, from their basis in novels that became operas (though Prévost's Manon Lescaut antedates Pushkin's verse Eugene Onegin by a century), through their patched-together scores that don't actually use the Massenet/Tchaikovsky operas, to the knotty questions of morality and culpability that attend their titular characters.

Testament to the work of Richard Alston Dance Company (RADC) over the 20 years since its foundation was not just the première-filled celebratory programme performed at Sadler's Wells last night, but the enthusiastic audience there to see it. Alston's own choreography never excites me particularly, but there's no denying his company has done sterling work for the British contemporary dance scene over the years, both through its association with the Place and London Contemporary Dance School, and through its extensive regional touring schedule.

Having gathered an excellent cadre of dancers and forged them over years into a fine company (The Talent), the BalletBoyz Michael Nunn and William Trevitt – two of the most astute artists in dance – must have known they needed to go further, to tackle something bigger than the 20-minute abstract pieces that are the staple of contemporary mixed bills. Young Men, which premièred last night at Sadler’s Wells is that something bigger, a full evening's work with defined thematic concerns and some semblance even of narrative.

“A link in the chain of beauty” – that’s how the choreographer August Bournonville, in the 1840s, wanted every dancer in the Royal Danish Ballet to regard their art. And, remarkably, the chain of beauty we now call the Bournonville style has remained unbroken ever since. For complex reasons of politics and geography, as well as national personality, no doubt, while Romantic ballet in the rest of Europe fell under the spell of flashier Russian developments, the aesthetic Bournonville cultivated in Copenhagen remained impervious, in a little bubble of its own.

The twelve days of Christmas may be over, but I have good news for ballet fans in London: a whole new batch of presents for you has washed up at the Coliseum, and it's overflowing with lords-a-leaping, ladies dancing, and swans-a-swimming.